In any season, few Appalachian vistas can rival the views from the mile-high Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects Virginia’s Shenandoah highlands with North Carolina’s Great Smokies. When I visited, the freshly unfurled leaves of oaks and maples were green. The flowering tulip poplars appeared yellowish-green. Pollen fluff floated on air through the slanting sun. In the distance, bluish layers of the mountainsides were festooned with flowering white dogwood and blooming pink redbud.

During the 1960s, when Sean Gallagher was 16, his mother took him fishing for steelhead on the Skagit River in northern Washington State, on the Canadian border. In the young Gallagher—now a retired teacher living in the shadow of Mount Rainier—the experience ignited a passionate pursuit of the giant sea-run rainbow trout.

To witness world-class dogsled racing, you don’t have to fly all the way to frigid Fairbanks to watch the Alaska Open North American Championship or stand at the crowded finish of the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous.

Aldo Leopold, The famous 20th century wildlife biologist and conservationist, summed up perfectly the lure and lore of ruffed grouse: “There are two kinds of hunting. Ordinary hunting and ruffed-grouse hunting.” Leopold knew. He pioneered modern wildlife management in Wisconsin, where this beautiful bronze creature of the forest edge is known as the king of game birds.

I sit in the fighting chair aboard the 33-foot charter sport-fishing boat Reel Addiction, mesmerized by the churning wash of a stream of white bubbles into the clear, sapphire-blue South Pacific Ocean. Behind and above me on the bridge, at the helm, is skipper Steve Campbell, a 60-year-old tanned and sinewy ex-New Zealander.

The New York Times recently pointed to the Cascade Mountains as the beneficiary of 110 inches of precipitation during March and April each year, declaring Stevens Pass “a prime place for spring skiing.” Well, some years. Other years, what falls is rain. The snow gets slushy. I know. It’s my neck of the woods. I live an easy two hours’ drive from Stevens.

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Quote/Unquote

“"How many leaders actively seek out and encourage views alien and at odds with their own? All too few...Who in your organization serves as your Challenger In Chief? Interrogating the choices you are considering making? Making you consider the uncontemplated, the unimaginable and that which contradicts or refutes your position? And also challenging you?"”

-Noreena Hertz, author of Eyes Wide Open: How To Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World